Quotes from Gregory Maguire

The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.

Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.

Was it an accident that I saw Fiyero, I wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes, or is it just that world unwraps itself to you again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.

I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.

Oh now that's a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future

With all those stars in the sky, why isn't there enough light for us to see by? We stumble like blinded sheep.' 'As you can see, it is clouding over. The stars can't pierce the gloom; they just wait it out. That isn't the stars fault. It is their custom to stay heavenly.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don't forget we loved it when we were alive.

It isn't hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

Such silly things, children -- and so embarrassing -- because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn't it?

looking at him makes her feel like laughing all over - as if she could laugh not just with her mouth but with her eyes, her heart, her very limbs.

It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.

I dabble in causes and effects.

She would emerge. She always had before. The punishing political climate of Oz had beat her down, dried her up, tossed her away—like a seedling she had drifted, apparently too desiccated ever to take root. But surely the curse was on the land of Oz, not on her. Though Oz had given her a twisted life, hadn't it also made her capable?

SELF-MOCKERY IS AN UGLIER THING THAN ANY HUMAN FACE, IRIS... YOU ARE SMART AND YOU ARE KIND. DON'T BETRAY THOSE IMPULSES IN YOURSELF. DON'T BELABOR THE LACK OF PHYSICAL BEAUTY, WHICH IN ANY CASE EVENTUALLY FLEES THOSE WHO HAVE IT AND MAKES THEM SAD.

Is there a relative value of beauty? Is evanescence - fleetingness - a necessary element of the thing that most moves us? A shooting star dazzles more than the sun. A child captivates like an elf, but grows into grossness, an ogre, a harpy. A flower splays itself into color - the lilies of the field! - more treasured than any painting of a flower. But of all these things, women's grace, shooting stars, flowers, and paintings, only a painting endures.

perhaps charity is the kind of beauty that we comprehend the best because we miss it the most.

I don't like work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives.

How could anyone live without flying?

I learned to fly on a broom, he said, rolling up his sleeves. I can learn to milk a goat, I bet. Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate, said Elphaba. See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.